I am a young man, but I have watched a whole lot of baseball in my time. A lot of those have been Minnesota Twins games and I really should have appreciated those games in the first decade of this new millennium, but you live and you learn, I guess.
If I don’t come off with the same pizazz that I usually do, it’s because that I have watched a lot of Twins baseball this season as well. All you’ve really had to see is Sunday’s game or Monday’s game to know where I am going with this. If you don’t know where I’m going, well, I’m going to drop it on you like a Twins outfielder.
What the hell is going on defensively?
There have been points in the past two games specifically that it looks like some of the people that Paul Molitor is throwing out into the outfield have never played a game of baseball in their life. It started on Sunday with the great idea of putting Eduardo Nunez in left field. What Nunez is doing on this team is a mystery, but putting him in the outfield is just asking for disaster. That showed with Nunez having a fairly easy pop fly pop in and out of his glove.
That was followed in the same inning by the other Eduardo, Eduardo Escobar, doing the same thing at third base. This is where I should give some credit to Trevor Plouffe, he made his second career start at first and played pretty well as he gave Joe Mauer a DH day.
Poor Phil Hughes. Now he and Trevor May have something to talk about.
May got the nod to pitch the home opener after the Ricky Nolasco injury and pitched well. Not great, but not as bad as his stat line suggests. The defense behind him was horrible. Oswaldo Arcia was back in left and missed a sliding catch which probably should have been caught, but that doesn’t even take the cake. The cake belongs to Torii Hunter.
Hunter missed his cutoff man. Hunter’s throw from right field saw it go by both Brian Dozier and Danny Santana and allowed runners to advance a base. Hunter did this. The one outfielder we are supposed to be able to depend on. A Gold Glover. To hell with the defensive metrics, he missed a cutoff man.
I don’t even know what to say other than the fact that this has to be the worst defensive stretch I’ve ever seen a ball club go through. Judd Zulgad of 1500ESPN has a great idea and I think Molitor needs to do this:
After today's performance, let me say this again: If I'm Molitor, nobody goes to the clubhouse after this game and we work on fielding.
— Judd Zulgad (@jzulgad) April 13, 2015
That’s my only solution. I think it’s the only solution.
My rant is now over… until Eduardo Nunez is in the outfield again.
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